Added a little bit of Effie and Jack in the thoughts, cleaned up Dalton's travel story.Chapter TwoThough Katniss's demands included a declaration of immunity for the captured victors in front of all of District Thirteen, I am still not invited for the actual declaration. This is declared a medical exception. It's also not broadcast into my room, since, again, I have no video screens. It occurs to me that Katniss may have intentionally disinvited me, but I decide that's probably not true. It's not her style.

Finnick comes down immediately afterward and says, "Katniss saved Annie, too." He smiles broadly, like a proud big brother, bragging about his sister's great negotiating skills. "Coin said her name specifically."

"That's great," I say. "Did they mention a rescue?"

He shakes his head, deflating. "No. Same as it's been. And I think…" He sighs. "I'm pretty sure the deal is off if Katniss's propos don't work.

"I had the impression Coin wasn't thrilled about the deal."

"I think she's used to people obeying her without conditions." He seems troubled for a minute, but pushes it away. "She looks better. Katniss, I mean. After she went to Twelve. It's like someone woke her up. Maybe you should go."

I imagine the dust and the bodies and the ghosts, and I shake my head firmly. "They wouldn't let me, anyway."

"You should send someone for your things. Snow's had people in and out. They took things."

I hid the important things in places no one knows about, and, as long as they don't decide to burn Victors' Village after all, they should be safe. The easy hiding places, like the hidden cubbies under the floor, have enough contraband in them that Snow will think he's hit the jackpot. I'd like to get my parents' quilt and my dictionary and Mimi's statue, but at the same time, I don't want them to be here. I don't think anyone would understand them here.

Finnick gives up whatever scheme he has to get me to Twelve. He gives up easily these days. Instead, he tells me about Mags's house, and the way she liked to dance on the beach. Then he falls asleep in the visitor's chair. I pull the blanket off my bed and toss it over him. They come in to escort him back to his bed before dinner. I ask if he can stay and eat with me, but for some reason, this time, they say no.

Just before lights out, two doctors come in with an orderly I've only met once before -- when he slipped me an illegal detox pill to put off the shakes until the rescue crafts got back from Twelve. I don't know why he's here, and half expect him to turn me in for that pill, but instead, he smiles affably and says, "Doctors say you're ready to live out of the hospital."

"Great. I'll pack my things."

"Not by yourself," one of the doctors announces. "You are still in recovery."

"Which is where I come in," the orderly says. He extends his hand. "Luzon Dalton," he says. "I'm imported from District Ten. They reckon I've been enjoying my solitary splendor long enough, and there's room in my place."

"You're expected to check in daily," the other doctor says. "It will be encoded on your schedule, and if you fail to check in, you may be re-admitted."

They begin a long list of forbidden activities. I nod a lot and try not to laugh, since behind them, Luzon Dalton is mimicking them with exaggerated expressions. Every time one of them turns enough to see him, he arranges his face in a pleasant grin.

They finally let me go, and issue me a few sets of the gray clothes everyone else wears, along with soap and a razor and an instruction to shave daily. Apparently, "rakish" is not a valid style choice in District Thirteen. The idea of cutting my hair very short is brought up, but I pretend not to hear it. There's also an envelope marked "Abernathy -- Personal Effects," though I have no idea what's in it. I wasn't even wearing any jewelry when I left the Capitol.

Dalton leads the way down one of Thirteen's bland corridors to a bland door, behind which is a bland little one-room apartment. There is a television, a pair of dressers, and two bunks. The bathroom is off to the side. Hanging on the wall, given pride of place above the television, is a large, truly awful painting of a cow in a pasture. The perspective is off, and it looks like it's about to tumble down into the room. Dalton goes to the side of the room that looks occupied and sits down at a desk, on which he's placed a white hat with a wide brim. "Reckon you'll want something of Twelve here," he says. "I could paint you a coal mine, if you tell me what one looks like."

"I don't need a coal mine," I say. I think about my home, and the beautiful painting Peeta did of me with Katniss. That's about the only piece of art I want, and it's completely out of reach. So I tip an invisible glass to the giant cow painting and say, "I'll just learn to love Ten."

"I paint during Reflection. I had to get special permits for luxury equipment, but the doctors said it's part of my recovery."

"Recovery?"

"We have a few of the same demons, as you might have guessed from the interaction we never had involving a pill that you absolutely didn't take since I never would have given it to you."

"Gotcha."

He shrugs. "You get used to it after a while. You don't stop wanting the stuff, but you learn to tell yourself that it's not coming, so you may as well get on with things."

"Thanks," I say. I put my gray clothes in the drawers of the empty dresser, then look curiously at the personal effects envelope. "What happened to my clothes?" I ask, opening the envelope.

"Oh, they take that sort of thing down to Command, in case someone needs to go out under cover." He nods at the envelope. "Your friend Hazelle rescued that stuff from the pockets. Had herself a good eye-roll at it, too."

Curiously, I slide a stack of photographs out of the envelope. The top one shows a girl in a sparkly headdress marching in a parade. The next shows the same girl at a school ceremony, wearing a fancy hat and a dress with lit-up buttons. The next shows her standing with me (I look very drunk and very grumpy) in a room in the Viewing Center.

Effie Trinket.

I remember scooping a handful of pictures up off of her floor when I went to her apartment, meaning to rescue her and failing miserably. I don't know why I took them. I didn't even look at them then, and haven't thought about them since. I wasn't thinking about anything other than her absence, and the mess they'd made of her apartment, and that she was being held by Snow's people. That I hadn't gotten there in time. That she'd kissed me and I wanted her and I'd let Snow destroy her the same as I let him destroy everyone else.

I go through them more slowly, looking at her through the years. Some of the pictures I snagged are formal portraits. Others are more candid. There is one of her at the shore of the Capitol lake, holding on a long blue wig against the wind with one hand and laughing. I took this one. She was trying to prove that there was something worth seeing in the Capitol. It was the day she kissed me and I laughed at her.

I look up and find Dalton watching me, the goofy country-boy face replaced by a thoughtful and intelligent one. "Your lady?" he asks.

I shake my head. "Effie's my friend." I look through the pictures again. "She's irritating as hell, really. I tried to get her out, but I was too late. Of course I was late. Effie's the one who keeps me on time for things. She used to say that if she wasn't with me when I died, I'd be late for my funeral. She was probably right." I put the pictures in a drawer.

Dalton takes a picture out of his own drawer and shows it to me. It's a plain woman in blue jeans and a chambray shirt. "My wife," he says. "Also irritating as hell."

"What happened to her?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Nothing, as far as I know. She finally got sick of me crawling home drunk, and kicked me out. Which prompted me to drink more, and call the feed master some nasty names. My son told me he heard in school that they had it in for me, so I slipped the fence and went on the run. After packing up the important things, of course."

"The booze?"

"Well, I couldn't very well afford the DTs out in the wilderness, could I?" He smirks, and I realize that he actually does know this song. "Three weeks out, I hit on the train tracks. A rebel from District Six hid me until I got to Twelve" -- he looks up sharply, apparently thinking that the mention of Twelve will start me screaming. "Um, sorry."

"It's okay. You had to have gone through there to get here."

"Yeah. Anyway, they dumped me in the woods and told me to follow the broken tracks north. I was out of booze when I got here. There never seems to be enough, does there?"

I smile in recognition. Once you really get started, the concept of enough becomes a joke.

"Anyway," Dalton says, "I was completely raving by then."

"And they introduced you to the fascinating world of hospital janitorial services?"

"I did animal husbandry back in Ten. It's no worse than being up to my elbow in a cow's private parts." He shrugs. "They did ask me to go back into husbandry. Had me looking at a huge genetic information bank."

"But you didn't stick with it?"

"Not when I found out it was the genetic bank of the human population here."

"What?"

"Oh, they're not trying to create a master race or anything. No one's being forced into anything. They're just trying to get up to viable levels of fertile people, because frankly, they're in a death spiral. I was telling your girl Katniss about it last week -- they lost a lot of their population in a viral outbreak, and a lot of the ones left are infertile. That's why they're so glad to have newcomers. As a genetic scientist, I get it. If we were talking about cattle, I'd be leading the charge. But I can't bring myself to treat people like breeding stock."

"What did they want you to do?"

"Mostly create file tags to indicate reproductively useful people with no genetic abnormalities. There was some talk about setting up matchmaking, which never went anywhere. Mostly, it's about who gets approved for married quarters, who gets to use the jugs --"

"The jugs?"

Dalton laughs. "Conjugal visit rooms. The young fellows call them the jugs. I mean, come on, these apartments for non-marrieds aren't exactly conducive to fooling around, unless you happen to be fooling around with the person you bunk with, I guess. You're not my cup of tea, personally, but I suspect a few of the young roommates out there might be sharing more than space. I reckon Coin will get testy about that eventually, with population levels dropping, but for now, they ignore it."

I nod awkwardly, and think about Jack's husband, Linden, out in Seven. He's got a good head on his shoulders, and I hope he was smart enough -- and in his right mind enough after what happened in the arena -- to get out of Victors' Village before Snow's people showed up. Or maybe he was watching from town or the loggers' camps; it must have been pretty empty out there to watch alone. "You're not really my type, either," I say.

Dalton smiles. "At any rate, there are rooms up on the fourth level that you can sign up for, but only if there's a chance of a baby and if the people are stable and healthy enough to be parents. Though, trust me, people find ways around it."

"How do they… know?"

"You have to be on an approved list to sign up. If you want to be on the list, you get tested at the hospital to make sure everything's working like it's supposed to." He grins. "They test regular patients routinely. You passed, if you're interested, though I'd guess Coin would want to weed out that pesky drinking problem if she could afford to."

"Great." I do not want to think too carefully about this subject. Something else he said snags in my mind, and I take it gratefully. "You said you talked to Katniss?"

"Yeah. She's a nice kid."

"How is she? Really?"

"She's in shock. She's had to absorb a lot, and she's worried as hell about that boy she loves. I think she thinks it's her fault what Snow did to Twelve."

"She's going to have to get in line there," I say. "There are quite a few of us ahead of her."

"Hey," Dalton says. "That line starts and ends with Snow."

I don't bother arguing. "Finnick thinks she's seriously damaged."

Dalton sighs. "I'd still have her in the hospital if it were up to me. Maybe talking to one of those head doctors. We have one who got here from the Capitol. But I don't think she's broken. I found her hiding out in a storage room when I went to get supplies."

"Hiding?"

"A perfectly sane activity sometimes, if you ask me," he says. "She's got people yakking at her from every direction. I think she just needs time to get her head straight. I saw her in her Games. She's a tough girl. Maybe not as tough as she thought, but still tough. I respect her. We talked about Thirteen. She sees it pretty clearly, which is more than I can say for some of the people who aren't considered unstable."

I consider asking who he thinks isn't seeing things clearly, then decide to have a look for myself without any preconceptions. We talk a little bit more before lights-out, then he goes to sleep. He snores like some kind of mutt engineered to shake a house down, and I stay awake for a long time after, looking up into the near absolute darkness (a set of tiny lights marks the base of the bathroom door). I try to remember my way through one of my books to keep my mind active, but once I've read the things, they become singular experiences, and all of their events seem to happen at once… meaning that it doesn't take long to remember a whole one. Mostly, I think about the people I left behind. I think of Peeta. I think of Jo.

But for the first time, I really think of Effie, and I wish she were here with me. She would be utterly shocked by the things Dalton has said, and I imagine her wide, startled eyes at the notion of the jugs, or who was deemed worthy to make use of them. I imagine telling her that I "qualify," and how she'd blush and roll her eyes, nervous and exasperated at the same time. Why did I tell Dalton that she just irritates me? It's not like he didn't see right through me. It's habit, I guess.

And it's not like we were together, not beyond a couple of kisses.

Finally, I fall asleep. It feels very late, since it's been dark so long, but I have a feeling it's probably still earlier than I habitually go to bed.

Dalton wakes me up at six-thirty, and teaches me to stick my arm in a contraption that tattoos the day's schedule on it. I promptly name the contraption "Effie," and stick one of the stuffy formal pictures of her under the lip of a screw that holds it to the wall. Wall-Effie tells me that after my shower and breakfast, I'm to report to Command for the next several hours, only taking a break at lunchtime for my daily check-in at the hospital. Dalton helps me figure how to get there, since I can't tell one gray hallway from another yet.

When I get to Command, I find Fulvia and Plutarch, who I expected, with Finnick, who I didn't. Commander Boggs is there as well, looking more relaxed than the last few times I've seen him. To my surprise, Gale Hawthorne is present, though he keeps checking his schedule and the clock.

"I have training," he says. "I can't stay all day. How long does prep take? They've already been down there twenty minutes!"

I laugh. "Oh, you really haven't been paying attention to the Games. They might have decided what they're going to do by now. I wouldn’t expect her to be out for a while."

"Especially with quite a lot of arena damage to repair," Fulvia says. "Her hair was damaged by the acid fog," she explains to me, looking reproachfully at Plutarch. "And her skin is not in good condition."

"Her preps know what they're doing," Plutarch says. "And hopefully, they're still able to do it."

"What does that mean?" I ask.

Plutarch shakes his head and waves it off to Fulvia, who tells me that the preps were caught stealing bread and were punished for it.

"We found them chained to a wall," Gale says. "It was a little extreme. But Katniss and Plutarch took care of it."

I have no idea what to say to this. I've gotten the impression that Thirteen is strict, but chaining people to the wall over stolen bread seems, as Gale put it, extreme. I look at Plutarch. "What the hell have you been doing?"

"I didn't know about it," he says. "As soon as I found out, I did something."

"Didn't anyone check on them?" I look at Fulvia, who arranged their abduction from the Capitol. "Did you even talk to them after you got them here?"

"Plutarch and I have been involved in important war duties," she says. "I was told they had been settled. They weren't interested in talking to me."

"Katniss was pretty upset," Gale says.

"I don't doubt it."

He frowns. "I really don't understand it. They worked for the Games. Not as secret rebels like Plutarch or Cinna. They actually worked for them."

I have a feeling that Gale tried this conversation with Katniss and got an earful of things that made no sense to him. He's never been in the Games. I think about trying to explain it -- trying to express what it means that there are people there trying to help you, that they can be kind, and that kindness means everything when you think you're about to die -- but I can see that he doesn't want an argument. He wants me to say that she's obviously crazy. I remember Hazelle saying, about Effie, that she was never going to like someone who called on two kids to die every year. As if nothing else could matter.

I say, "Let her decide who she's going to get upset over," and leave it at that. People who haven't been there are never going to understand it, anyway.

Ten minutes later, Gale grumbles and heads off to training. Once he's gone, Plutarch and Fulvia pull up a program with renderings of the propaganda piece they mean to film today. In them, Katniss is wearing Cinna's armor and walking through a smoky battle.

"It's carefully crafted to include everything she represents -- bravery, the fight against hunger, the fight for justice, an address directly to the people. It'll be carved in stone someday."

I look at the script she hands me. The line, centered and highlighted, is People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!

It's even worse than the scripts she tried to hand me earlier. "You're kidding, right?" I say.

She bristles. "What do you mean?"

"Who would say this? When have you ever heard Katniss Everdeen talk like this?"

"I will have you know," she says, "that experts have analyzed the imagery surrounding Katniss Everdeen. They have isolated the themes that she represents to people. Those themes are the very essence of the poetry, both verbal and visual!"

I don't know which annoys me more -- that they're putting this garbage in the mouth of a seventeen-year-old who would never say it, or that Fulvia has the gall to call it poetry. I accept that we have to do propaganda. The Capitol has had seventy-five years to set up its narrative, and we have a few weeks to break it. But to call it poetry is an insult to every real poet I've ever read.

Plutarch apparently senses that I'm about to insult Fulvia, who looks on the brink of tears at my response already, and says, "Now, Haymitch, you know how it is with scripts. They always look empty until the actors are there. You'll see. It'll be amazing." He gives me a pointed sort of glare, and I close my mouth for the remainder of the presentation.

Once we've finished, I have a look around the set. Boggs comes with me. He seemed disgusted by me when I first met him, but now he's behaving normally. Maybe he's fine with me sober. Or maybe I was already starting to get paranoid before.

"You think they're right?" he asks, gesturing around the set.

"The experts certainly seem to think so," I say.

"Guess I’m no expert," Boggs tells me. "This isn't really what I had in mind when I was thinking about that mockingjay."

"What were you thinking about?"

"That little girl Rue. How Katniss sang to her." He shrugs. "I have a daughter. I just kept thinking, that child could be her. And if she had been, I'd have wanted someone like Katniss to be with her at the end. Someone who cared."

"They didn't show it, but Katniss actually covered her in flowers," I say.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And then Peeta painted it during his evaluation to rub the judges' noses in it."

"You're worried about him, aren't you?"

"I'd be kind of crazy not to be. Snow's got him."

"Did you see his interview last night?"

"No, but I heard enough about it. You don't really think that was spontaneous, do you?"

Boggs thinks about it. "There were a lot of hints that we should think it."

"What do you mean?"

"They let him talk about how awful it was in the arena. What it's like to be a tribute, and have to kill people. He said it destroys everything you are."

"Melodramatic, but not wrong."

"The point is, if he was allowed to say something like that, he did have some freedom."

I think about it, then shake my head. "That would make it look more sincere. Which is probably why he was allowed to do it. Make it sound like he had some freedom, and suddenly the rest of it seems more real. If I had to make a guess, I'd say something like that was Caesar's idea. He's almost as good at playing a narrative out as Peeta is, and he wants to make sure the Games end."

This obviously confuses Boggs. I don't care. I am thinking about what he said, about what Katniss meant to him personally. I wonder what everyone else -- other than Fulvia's experts -- would say.

At lunchtime, I go back up to the hospital to have my blood checked so they can make sure I haven't used the last few hours to invent a still and get drunk, possibly on distilled watery oatmeal. Ruth Everdeen does the test.

"I’m sorry I snapped at you," she says coolly. "You were handy."

"It's okay."

"What are they doing with my daughter?"

"It's complicated," I tell her. "And possibly kind of stupid. But we're all there watching out for her."

She looks over her shoulder, then whispers, "What are they going to do about Peeta?"

"Well, Katniss protected him from any punishment… at least from us."

"Can't they rescue him?" She bites her lip. "I don't know what to make of him with Katniss, but he's Dannel's son. He's all that's left of a man I used to love quite a lot. No one listens when I say that he's a good boy. They're all angry at him."

I close my eyes and think of Danny, burning in the night. "I know."

"You'll do what you can for him, too, won't you?"

"Every single thing there is, plus anything else I think of."

She nods and retrieves my test results. I am negative for alcohol and any other drugs they think I may have somehow found. She marks this on my chart. I ask if I get a special gold star for it. I don't, but if I get enough accumulated checkmarks, I will be qualified to live on my own. Dalton arrives in time to hear this, and pretends to be deeply offended as he gets me down to a small dining hall on our level for lunch.

He pushes his stew around. "Your stomach strong enough to handle this stuff?"

"Here's hoping," I say.

I manage to choke the whole bowl down, but I'm still feeling queasy when I get back to the studio in Command. I spend the first hour of the afternoon huddled up in the back of the production booth, trying to hold it down. At some point, Katniss is brought up from her own lunch. I go to the window and look at her. It's the first time I've seen her close up since the hovercraft, when she scratched my face and blamed me for Peeta's captivity. She is thinner than she was, and her face has taken on a hollow sort of look that makes the bird armor look somewhat alarming. They've made her up heavily, and put a bandage over the place on her arm where Johanna dug out her tracker. She's carrying a shiny black bow.

I don't know why Coin thinks she needs me to control her. She's compliant to a fault as they prod and paint her, set her up with strange lighting, set off smoke bombs around her, and pose her like a shop window mannequin. Fulvia and Plutarch walk around her repeatedly, like carrion birds contemplating a particularly tasty bit of offal. She doesn't even glare at them. Coin's threat to negate their deal if she steps out of line has clearly been effective. This is the girl who dutifully memorized the Capitol's canned speech on the Victory Tour. Unfortunately, she has about the same level of passion for her performance here.

I amuse myself while they film her by trying to imagine what I'd send her if she were in the arena. Something decent to eat might perk her up, but wouldn't really get that passion out of her. What she really needs is something to direct her anger at. Getting nebulously angry isn't her style, any more than being sentimental and mawkish over her love life is. She needs something concrete.

They watch some proofs of her down on the floor. I see her staring at the odd looking creature on screen. There's no real recognition in her eyes.

When she reads her script, I see her wince at the line she'll need to say, but as they set up the cameras around her, she mutters it under her breath until she has it committed to memory. I watch the monitors around me as they turn up the smoke and flip on a fan to simulate a windy day. Fulvia and Plutarch don't come back to the booth.

Katniss stands up stiffly, pretending (per Fulvia's instructions) that she's just lost a comrade in arms. She looks nothing like Katniss Everdeen after having lost someone. For one thing, she's not trying to kill anyone or screaming or making a gesture of respect to the body, possibly because they neglected to have one on set. She just makes a face like she has a mildly upset stomach, clenches her fists, and says, "People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice!"

Fulvia holds her hands to her heart, transported with ecstasy. No one else on set looks transported by anything. The shaven-headed director looks irritated. One of the cameramen yawns and sits down.

I go to the microphone on the control panel, which I haven't been given permission to use, and turn it on. "And that, my friends," I say, "is how a revolution dies."

Katniss turns around and looks up at the booth, her face a study in shock. Apparently no one told her I was here.

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One continuity thing: In the next chapter, when Haymitch calls the meeting, Gail comes in quite sweaty from physical training, and Haymitch has to explain the shoot fiasco to him. Since there's a sizeable chunk of dialogue between them in that chapter that you'd need to remove, maybe just remove the mention of him looking puzzled here so the next bit can proceed as though he weren't there?

Damn, I'd forgotten how awful that propo actually was! Ah, Fulvia, I would feel sorry for you, except that your talents as a writer are truly execrable.

Other than that, really loved all the additions. Dalton's back-story flowed much more naturally this time around, and all the Jack thoughts were fabulous--and sad, of course. I especially liked what you did with Haymitch's thoughts about Effie here; I'd been wondering since the kiss in GM precisely what his stance on his and Effie's relationship would be here, because he was considerably more self-aware in the edited kiss than he was in the original version. I'm glad you've had that self-awareness continue to an extent and not had the withdrawal enact a sort of "reset" button; it feels much more consistent and IC for Haymitch as you've crafted him. I also really appreciated, though, that the way he refers to Effie in mixed company didn't immediately change; that's a lot of ingrained habits to break immediately.

And yeah, I can completely understand--and think it's a very valid choice on his end--why he doesn't bring his valuables to D13; he's got very good intuition. One could wish that that intuition could become somewhat nebulous a little earlier in the piece, but then you'd be writing AU where poor Prim didn't die, so. :) But yeah, he's got a good foundation early on for what's to come later. And I like that Finn's hackles were most definitely up as well; because Finn's such a people person, it feels very logical that he'd recognize what was happening in 13, if not its extent,very early on.

I'm not spotting the continuity thing. Here, he's responding to the preps. Later on, he's joking about the line and saying it in a Capitol accent, while Haymitch explains the situation to everyone else. (I am going to see if I can smooth that canon retread out. I'm disliking those a lot on this read-thru.) I'll make it clearer that he leaves before the script comes out.

The worst part about Fulvia is, she thinks she's inspired by Haymitch. (Well, the emo-teen Haymitch who wrote poetry... only they're now in their forties.)

Haymitch is definitely more self-aware than I originally thought of him as, at least regarding Effie, though he doesn't necessarily understand what he's aware of.

I had a really long day, and that continuity explanation was a mess; sorry! Naw, I meant the whole bit where you have him be present while they're filming the propo; where he looks puzzled at K's awful performance. Because in the next chapter, there's an entire bit when Haymitch goes down to see Beetee where he has to explain about what a mess the propo is; it starts with: "They wanted her to say what?" Gale etc. etc. So yeah, I think having him leave before the script comes out will work fine. Sorry that was such a rambling mess before, and it hopefully makes a bit more sense now. *headdesks*

Fulvia holds her hands to her heart, transported with ecstasy. No one else on set looks transported by anything. The shaven-headed director looks irritated. Gale Hawthorne seems puzzled. One of the cameramen yawns and sits down.